Me thinks that Lois Lerner and the Treasury Secretary be lying.
After all, how do all the Washington DC IRS officials in the Exempt Organizations Division find out about this in July of 2010, even by mistake, and Louis Lerner, Director of the Exempt Organizations Division and head of the Cincinnati office find out in June of 2011? C’mon there is no freaking way it happened like that.
REUTERS – A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati in July 2010 alerted a broad group of Washington IRS officials to the heightened scrutiny being given conservative groups, according to an interview the IRS worker gave congressional investigators.
The interview transcripts, reviewed by Reuters on Thursday, provide new details about Washington IRS officials’ awareness of the scrutiny given to groups seeking tax-exempt status using terms like “Tea Party” or “patriot” to flag applications.
The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating “emerging issues” for the agency’s tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.
She was asked to summarize her findings in a spreadsheet and notify a small group of colleagues, including some staff in the Washington tax-exempt unit. She sent an email that month to a larger number of people in Washington by accident.
“Everybody in D.C. got it by mistake,” Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit.
Hull could not be reached for comment.
Lois Lerner, the IRS official who set off the controversy, said she first learned of the “be on the lookout list” (BOLO) of partisan terms in June 2011, and ordered the criteria be removed immediately. The Treasury inspector general backed that up.
Washington IRS officials including Lerner, who was put on administrative leave in response to the fracas, have stressed the lack of Washington involvement in the scrutiny.